Report on a Pilot Study of Investigations into Cultural-Natural Landscapes and Ecological Patch Islands in Forest Canyon Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park

Brunswig, Robert; Doerner, James; Diggs, David

The University of Northern Colorado (UNC) has conducted extensive archeological research in Rocky Mountain National Park since 1998. From 1998 through 2002, the university engaged in a large-scale series of archeological surveys and test excavations throughout the park as part of a National Park Service-funded Systemwide Archeological Inventory Program (SAIP). Over five years of fieldwork, the university documented more than 1,000 prehistoric and historic sites within ~30,000 acres of designated survey research areas. Since 2002, UNC has continued smaller scale archeological investigations within the park, including a long-term Native American sacred landscape research program and the subject of this report, a pilot project to intensely study and document one of the park’s most heavily occupied areas, Forest Canyon Pass. Long known for its extraordinarily artifact-rich Forest Canyon Pass site (5LR2), a dozen more sites were recorded in the Pass during the SAIP Project and, most recently, by a small pilot project survey of only 115 acres, documented in this report. The theoretical framework of the project associated with this report, a project entitled "A Pilot Study of Investigations into Cultural-Natural Landscapes and Ecological Patch Islands in Forest Canyon Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park", is based on a leading edge interdisciplinary research approach, cultural landscapes and patch ecology, which integrate modern and prehistoric studies of past ecological and climatic systems and archeological "settlement" pattern reconstructions. This report documents results of an initial phase of a larger, more comprehensive research program in Forest Canyon Pass and its upper headwaters. The program’s goal is to determine the extent and time depth of past Native American utilization of the Pass and inventory the natural resources which made its use attractive and facilitated their success in living and thriving in the Park and its region for hundreds of generations. More importantly, the project was designed to test the hypothesis that Forest Canyon Pass, with its unusual geographic, topographic, hydrologic, and natural resource conditions constituted an unusually rich ecological (as well as physical) environment, in essence a resource-rich "patch island", in the midst of less well-endowed natural landscape terrains within the Park. Although the project is only just beginning, modern and prehistoric studies of the Pass’ ecosystem and climate and of its archeological occupations strongly suggest it played an extremely important role in past Native American cultural systems and the human-habitation history of the Park. Despite the incompleteness of archeological survey coverage in a planned, long-term project research area of ca. 470 acres, site density within the Pass and the mountain slope to its north and northeast can now be calculated at a minimum of 24 sites per square kilometer, the heaviest concentration of prehistoric sites in the Park. Paleoclimate data, along with Paleoindian-era projectile points, dating back 9,000 years or more show the Pass has been habitable and inhabited since the end of the last Ice Age...

Report on a Pilot Study of Investigations into Cultural-Natural Landscapes and Ecological Patch Islands in Forest Canyon Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park

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